Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Imagine a justice system built on rigorous evidence, not gut instincts or educated guesses about what works and what doesn't.
More people could access the civil justice they deserve.
The criminal justice system could be smaller, more effective and more humane.
The Access to Justice Lab here at Harvard Law School is producing that needed evidence. And this podcast is about the challenge of transforming law into an evidence based field.
I'm your host, Jim Greiner, and this is Proof Over Precedent.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: So we're back with Renee Dancer for another episode of Proof Over Precedent to discuss one of your projects, Renee, that you have been developing for several years and have actually implemented a successful pilot for and this one we're calling Eviction Diversion. And so welcome, Renee. Thanks so much for being with us again.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Thanks for having me again.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: And why don't we just reintroduce you.
What's your position title in a two second summary of your background and a fun fact?
[00:01:07] Speaker C: Sure.
My name is Renee Dancer. I'm a researcher at the Access to Justice Lab. I have been with the lab for a number of years now. So many I've lost count.
And prior to that I was a court administrator in Pennsylvania in both a rural jurisdiction as well as an urban jurisdiction. But I am a loyal or by trade fun fact.
I enjoy seeing live events.
Mostly this happens as live music, but it could happen really. I like I will go to sporting events live when I won't watch them on television.
So I enjoy seeing live events.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: And is there a recent live event that you, that you went to?
[00:01:54] Speaker C: The most recent live event I went to was a, I guess you would call it like a minor league soccer game. There is a minor league team near here. And so I did that recently or that was the most recent one. The most recent live music I went to was to see Pearl Jam, as you know, Jim.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Terrific. Super. And as you know, I'm your host, Jim Greiner. And so let's talk about the background for this study because this is one where, as I mentioned, you've completed a successful pilot and we'd actually would like to run a full scale study.
But let's set the stage here. What's the socioeconomic problem that has given rise to this study?
[00:02:37] Speaker C: That's such an interesting question.
There's a lot of problems, I think that have given rise to this particular study. But what we're looking at primarily is are there ways to avoid evictions? And what we know about evictions is is that eviction legal cases are very swift.
So by the time individual is about to be about to engage in an eviction legal action, There really is not a lot of time for a legal services intervention. Legal services are often reactive, as opposed to proactive in eviction cases simply because they don't know about the need until an eviction suit is filed. And by then it is really too late to make a lot of difference for the client. This study, this pilot and eventual study is hoping to understand are there ways to move some of the legal information upstream to allow folks to consume it and engage with community resources that might help to avoid eviction. And so in this study, we're really focusing on legal literacy, I guess, is what is how we've phrased this term. If people knew about their rights as tenants and about resources that were available in the community to help them when they're housing insecure, would they take up those resources and use that information to avoid evictions?
And that's really the premise behind this particular evaluation, which you've already.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: That means I think you've already suggested two outcomes for the study that examining one is take up of services and then a second is can we avoid the court proceeding down the road. Is that correct?
[00:04:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And I mean, I also think we're looking at housing security generally too. Is housing security improved? And of course that is premised on the idea that folks are taking up some of these resources.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Excellent. So it would have been better to say three moments, right?
Are we going to get higher take up of legal services because legal services in some sense are underutilized. Even though there's too much demand for them, they're still underutilized.
And second is can we avoid the court proceeding? And then third is can we improve on the socioeconomic problem, which is housing insecurity? Can we do all three? Which of those three things? Or can we do all three of those things simultaneously? So what is the intervention here? What is the idea for people that like medical terms is the treatment condition that we're studying?
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Yeah, we are. It's a very light touch intervention. And I guess preventative services are difficult to implement. And I think and so light touch interventions probably are the most economic way to try to intervene in a preventative way. But this is.
We are working with an organization called that is Houston based. The study is in Houston called Connective. Connective is a. And specifically their platform, Connective texts. It is a platform that is send. It essentially sends out information to people who have opted in to receive it via text. And their model is initially started as a disaster relief service. So in the kind of after the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey is when this, this program emerged and they sent out resources about disaster recovery efforts and, and other resources that community members could receive.
But after that, after that need assuaged to as a little bit, they started sending out generally texts about other community resources and in legal services available as well as resource. But it's not just legal services. Right. So for our evaluation we wanted to understand if we took advantage of the folks that have already agreed to receive text messages, could we provide them with.
Could we identify a population that was housing insecure first by.
In within that sample of folks who are receiving text text messages and then if we provided them with similar style information about housing related community based resources, information and legal services available to them via text, would that change any of these outcomes that we just, that we just discussed? So it's really about a familiar medium, a text message. It is not a high intensity kind of outreach effort, but it is familiar to the folks that are participating regular. So it was regular text messages on a, on a semi regular cadence and viewed as a trusted source. Right. Because it had established itself already as such.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: And what did the text messages look like? Were they, were they long?
You know, were they short like tweets or were they long, you know, dissertations? What did they look like?
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah, so we actually designed the materials for this evaluation simply because we, you know, the, the randomization in this particular study was folks either received what we're calling a super sample of housing related text messages or just the regular text messages that connective would send, which could focus on any issue that might be resolved through community resources or other community information.
So we developed.
Because they wouldn't have had this cadre of super sample of housing related resources, we developed some resources for the purposes of that study. And so they looked like a number.
All of the things you just mentioned. None of them were super long. But we had short texts that would be one text message. It wouldn't be like a series of messages. So if you have a service that would cut you off after a certain number of characters, we would and become a second text. We made sure it would be one.
So we had some of those. We had some that hyperlinked to like a website or a web page that would give the inform the more robust information. We created some flyer type messages so that you could open up what looked like a, a flyer and would give you information. And so we had a combination of just text, of pictures of direction to the actual source material.
So, so it was a. And that was all based on connectives, learning from doing their text campaigns about what is consumed and, and what is clicked on and what who is, how their read rates and that sort of thing. So they had a lot of prior knowledge about how to get folks to read the texts at least.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: And so the, and so the, and then what would be some, some example content of a text? It might say what.
[00:10:38] Speaker C: You can find all of this in the appendix of our final report. We have all of the actual text messages there. But it would, it would say things like, did you know that your landlord can't force you to move by changing the locks?
Just simple pieces of information like that. And, or it would say and it might give a link to a legal services provider if you're having that issue.
So generally stuff like that.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So and then, and then that was the sort of second step. So we provided information and then as you said, it provided a link to a legal services provider. Here's how you can get help.
[00:11:19] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: And so where did the help come from?
[00:11:24] Speaker C: So Texas has quite a bit of legal services agencies actually as states go. And so we looked for Houston based legal aid agencies. And so there I think were three of them that we could. And we would provide the information for, for all three. Right. Or if one of them was having a clinic, we, or at regular clinic hours or something like that, we would make sure to provide that information to.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: And who funded this study?
[00:11:54] Speaker C: This pilot was funded by J pal, which is the Poverty Action Lab, which is out of mit, is based in mit, but is a funder of rigorous evaluations in social justice spaces. Social justice. And I think more than just that, social science generally. Yeah.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: J PAL North America. Right. So there's J PAL International and then there's J PAL North America.
And the J stands for Jamil.
We'll include the link.
And so as you mentioned, this was a pilot study. I should have said who funded the pilot study for this effort.
One of the things that you mentioned earlier was you can view this as an effort to try to get information, potentially useful information upstream, so not waiting the way most legal services providers do, until a summary eviction case has been filed. As you mentioned, once an eviction case is filed, the timeline is typically quite tight, thus the word summary eviction in this area. So it is a summary process.
It does not have all the trappings of a typical court proceeding. There may be limited opportunities for discovery, there are limited legal issues that are involved.
Depending on the state, there may not be a right to a jury trial, et cetera. So it's a summary. It's typically a very, very short process.
And so one thought would be, let's get the information into the general public's hands.
Everybody should know about this.
And I guess that's a dream of all. Of all folks who care about access to justice, that the world should know more about the things that we work on.
But the problem, what's the problem with that?
[00:13:44] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I don't know how we would. How we would accomplish getting that information to everyone. I mean that information is available to everyone now.
It's just not readily. It's not readily accessible. But also it's irrelevant to.
To large swaths of the public. Right. Like folks who, who would never be at risk for predatory landlord activity or, or accidental landlord lord activity that results in a formal or informal eviction. And I guess when I say informal eviction, like the idea that someone moves because they have no other choice, but there's no real legal action, that there's some barrier that keeps that is put in place so that they can't really stay in their house, like habitability issues like mold or water not working correctly or the example I gave earlier where a landlord just may change the locks and you don't have a key anymore.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: To get into your house, which is illegal. But you'd have to know that, right?
[00:14:53] Speaker C: Exactly.
So I don't know that it's.
It is a dream to make sure everybody understands in the world and, or in the US at least understands the kind of problematic nature of the quick swiftness of housing legal issues and thus has information about how to avoid that if they find themselves in that situation. But because it's irrelevant to many people, I think that it probably wouldn't be consumed, I guess retained perhaps.
But this study, this pilot really focused on narrowing the scope of who we gave this information to, to people it would be relevant for whom it would be relevant. And we did that using.
Which is also, I think a unique part of this study is that we used the text messaging as a way narrow that scope and to enroll and determine, determine eligibility and enroll people in the study. And we did that through screener questions first. So we asked people essentially. And again these questions are in our appendix of our final report.
Once we write it, once that's published, you'll see them. But the questions were essentially making sure folks were adults because in our study we were not incorporating children in even though that this could certainly be an issue for especially emerging adults, but also to ask them questions about whether or not they felt housing secure and that wasn't like a lot of questions.
It was do are you having trouble with your landlord or do you otherwise feel insecure in your housing? Questions like that.
But just to make sure we were really focusing on the population of folks that needed this resource. And the pilot was a pilot evaluation is often making sure you can operationalize the evaluation, which is what we were doing here. Could we administer surveys by. Could we enroll people by text? We didn't know. Could we administer surveys by text and get a reasonable response rate? We didn't know. And would. Could we collect the administrative data that we would need to show the outcomes that we were to analyze? The outcomes we were hoping to analyze? Again, we didn't know.
We suspected we could since that's something we do fairly regularly in all of our studies. But it was important to incorporate in the pilot. But what came out of the pilot is because we were able to enroll people and we were able to collect that administrative data and we were able to administer, administer surveys. Although we'll, I'm sure talk about that was the one thing that we thought we could do better in a full, in a full evaluation.
We did get very robust data. And what we learned is that we, not only were we targeting the right population of people, but we found some of the most at risk folks for the need for housing, legal services and housing, community, community based housing resources kind of in, in that area.
And perhaps like that is the most important finding of the, of the pilot, that maybe there is a way to, to target these resources and services to the people that actually will consume and retain it because it is super relevant to, to their life at the current moment.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So this was. So again, picking up on the question, why not just give the information to everybody? As you say, it's expensive, it's not relevant to everybody. It's hard to get folks to pay attention. So how do we identify a high risk population?
Can we can. Is it possible to identify a high risk population to whom we should try to get information. And this screening mechanism with a couple of simple questions and a text message from a source that people trusted, looked as though it might have worked. We don't really know for sure, but it looked as though that when we looked later, something like nine or ten months later, we actually had a somewhat high rate of people filing or having eviction cases filed against them.
[00:19:41] Speaker C: Yeah, so we had, so we had 101 people on our pilot, which is important to know.
Our target was 100. So we stopped after we got to 100 again just to show proof of concept. So we had 31 of those people experienced a formal eviction, 82 cases were filed. So that could mean that 31 people had a formal eviction and the difference of 82 and 31 had an eviction case filed but didn't experience an eviction, or it could mean that some of those 31 had multiple cases filed. And it's probably a combination of the two.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: Most of those were, Most of those 31 were prior to enrollment. But we did have some, what was it, around 10 or so that were post enrollment.
13 oh, 13. Yeah. So in some sense it was 13%.
Around 13. Since 101 is so close to 100, we can just say 13% experienced a post enrollment eviction filing or case.
And that, that's a, we, we don't have a baseline rate is the problem we looked for and could not easily find. If anyone, if any listener knows and can let us know what a baseline rate of eviction is across the United States. So if you're just an average person walking down the street and you know, and, and what's the, what's the probability that you're going to experience an eviction? An eviction court case over the next 10 months, which was our follow up period roughly between something between nine and 12 months.
But it struck us as fairly high.
It struck us as a high rate. And therefore one of the things that came from this pilot, as you said, is this may be a way to try to isolate a population that is at risk of housing insecurity, where interventions might be worth applying.
[00:21:52] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think it's important to note for those who aren't fully aware of the process, the legal process for eviction. Prior to the filing of an eviction case, a landlord must give a three day notice that they intend to file and that's called a notice to vacate, meaning I'm giving you three days to get out or I'm going to file this eviction case. And so there's also likely a population of folks who get a three day notice and leave, leave in, in three days, even though three days seems very quick.
Or they make arrangements to leave and the landlord doesn't file because they know this person plans to leave. So that is kind of, I think straddles the line of formal and informal eviction. Because that is a formal process. But it is, you could, it could just be used as a way to get people out as a threat.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: Right. As an elite, as potentially illegal threat. That. Exactly.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: But those wouldn't show up in that data is what I'm saying, that court case filing data.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Right. Because what we did was we took, we took names and identifiers and, and, and, and looked into court case records in the area in the, in the jurisdiction where the, where the, where the participant lived to see if there was a, there was a corresponding filing, if so, pulled the case record, the public case record.
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Right.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: And there, and thereby got the dates, et cetera.
The three days varies from state to state. Right. So that's Texas. That's a pretty short amount of time I think relative to other states.
Massachusetts, depending on the reason for the eviction, the amount of time could be anywhere from two weeks to 30 days, again depending on the reason for the eviction. But there are some that are quite short.
And again, to give an idea of how fast these go. Do you happen to know in Texas what the, of what the. If there's a filing, if there's an eviction lawsuit, how quickly is there a trial date?
In Rhode island it's something like five days in Massachusetts, again, Massachusetts being a tenant friendly state, the timelines can stretch out.
Do you happen to know in Texas.
[00:24:04] Speaker C: Actually don't know if they, I don't know that they have a dictated time frame by which the court case has to be filed or has to.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: Oh no, sorry. After the court case is filed, how quickly is there a hearing date?
[00:24:16] Speaker C: The legislation not dictate how long it must be before they have a court case. But it is pretty quick, I think quicker than the Rhode island example in practice that you gave. Right?
[00:24:28] Speaker B: Yeah. In Rhode island the issue is that the court case gets filed and then the landlord has a certain, very small but a certain number of days to actually notify the tenant or the defendant, the occupant of the housing unit of the existence of the lawsuit. So those may not even occur on the same day and the hearing is still five business days later.
And so you may only have a couple of business days to. Before you have your, before you have what in essence is your trial on whether you're going to remain in your housing unit.
[00:24:57] Speaker C: Yes. And what the law does dictate in Texas that if you are evicted by a court from a court case, you have six days to leave thereafter or appeal. And we can, and we could discuss the problems with that also. But so again, these are unreasonably short periods of time to even leave. Like if you could or wanted to leave if you're being evicted, you probably don't have a ton of options. So where exactly are you going? In six days or three days, if you take the threat of the notice to vacate. It's very short.
It's, it's unkind.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: And so the study, then what we did was we brought, we enrolled folks who said that they were interested in receiving this information. We gave them description of the study. This was a consent study.
[00:25:57] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Where they consented to participate in the study.
And then what happened from there on in, once they were enrolled, describe the experience of a participant.
[00:26:07] Speaker C: Sure. So again, because this was a pilot and we were really showing, we were really determining if we could operationalize the study, we did a baseline survey. So after folks consented by text, we did a baseline survey by text.
We then thereafter.
And so that was the extent of their experience on that first day.
All of our surveys were compensated, so they also would have received compensation shortly thereafter.
And then they were either.
We did the random assignment. We randomly assigned folks to either get that super sample of housing related resources or to just get the regular status quo connective texts, whatever they were normally getting or whatever connective was sending, which addressed a variety of issues.
And they did that on a regular cadence. So practically what that meant was we worked with connective to inform them about which condition each person was in. And then they operationalized the texting practice. But for participants, we then did surveys again at week six and week 12.
And we just did three surveys. That was just to show the proof of concept. In other studies, we would do more than just three.
But we did surveys at week six and weeks 12.
And then again, participants would be compensated for each survey they completed. That was it. They would, they would get the text messages, they would get whichever condition they were assigned to. And they would, and everyone got the surveys. They were the same survey each time.
And we, and they would get the compensation for us on the back end. We were also working with the data holders, doing data pools, making sure we had the right data that we, the right data that we were looking at. But for participants, their engagement with the evaluation was really just receiving the information and getting the surveys.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Super. And so we wanted again to prove various concepts that you said to try to run a full study at some point. One was, could we enroll? Could we meet enrollment targets?
And the answer to that was what?
Yes, we were able to do that. Right.
We had a set time period by which we were trying to enroll.
What was the enrollment time period again? I've forgotten, eight months or something.
[00:28:36] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. Exactly. It was a nine month goal of getting 100 people to enroll in nine months.
And it was interesting to see like the weird peaks and valleys and there's really no explanation for that. But we met that goal and then we had other proof of concepts. I won't anticipate your question. I'll let you ask.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Well then, okay, so then the next one, we wanted to enroll people and then what was the next. You tell me what was the next thing that we wanted to try to figure out.
[00:29:07] Speaker C: We wanted to know if what are, if we could do, if we could survey people in the same mechanism. So we are familiar with surveying people by text message. Often our survey operations include multiple mediums just so folks can respond in whatever way is comfortable to them. And text messages is one of them. But we wanted to see if people would respond to these surveys especially since they were having no other contact contact with us. Right. So in our, in other studies we, we might have, we would have more contact with them just directly. We often incorporate calling people, having an introductory conversation, just reminding them about surveys, doing more robust reminders in this instance that we just were sending the texts, sending some text reminders, seeing if people would do surveys without really having any human interface at all.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: And did that, that didn't work as well, is that right?
[00:30:03] Speaker C: It didn't work as well. We had, I mean people were responding but our response rate was lower than we would have liked.
And so what, what thinking about that in relationship to the, about other studies that I just mentioned that we, where we incorporate surveys and we have this kind of more robust connection with folks. You know, we think that in a full study we would want to just incorporate the effort to have more, a more robust connection with folks. So that can include things like, like I mentioned calling them on the phone to introduce ourselves so that they can put a person with the evaluation and that person is the person that they would talk to if they ever called us and asked to speak to someone.
And then we, in addition to reminders for surveys, if somebody doesn't complete a survey, we often start with text message reminders, but we move to then phone call reminders if somebody doesn't, if somebody doesn't respond as a result of the text message reminders and phone call reminders tend to pick up some of the people that didn't respond.
And so we just would incorporate, I think more hands on, more robust non response follow up to improve those response.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Rates, which as you say is something we've done in other studies. And the question here was since people are communicating and we know they're communicating via text, could we get away with not doing that. Looks like we can't because the response rates were around a third 33, between 30 and 40%. Is that correct?
[00:31:44] Speaker C: Yeah, they tapered off as you would expect, you know, with week six and week 12. But even the week six was between is like 42% and the week 12 is I think 36%. It was, they were lower than we would hope for. Yeah, of course the baseline is 100%.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Okay. Because that's a requirement of enrollment. You can't get in without, without completing the study, completing the enrollment survey. Excuse me.
And then the third thing we were trying to figure out was with respect to the records, could we find people with records and would we have sufficient confidence in our search capabilities there to say that if we didn't find someone that meant they weren't in, they didn't have a court filing? In other words, it's one thing to say if we find someone, we know they had one, that's a, that's okay. But we do, we know that if we don't find someone, they don't. And so what was what, what were your thoughts on that? Was that successful?
[00:32:34] Speaker C: Yeah, I think our record, our administrative records in this study are robust compared to some of our other studies. We had very, were very fortunate to, to have some really great data partners in this study. So we worked with two different HMIS services. So homeless management information system, which is essentially a clearinghouse of records related to housing based, housing related community based services that could be anything from crisis response months for homeless individuals or it could be to like housing voucher usage or other subsidized housing services or just like day shelters.
So the kind of challenge with that data which is true in any homeless management information system is that they rely on the, the, the resource, the service itself to report. And so folks actually have to interact with the service to show up in the data and then also make, making sure the reporting is correct. We worked with the state based hmis, so the Texas state based hmis and then also the local HMIS provider, so the Houston, Houston based exclusively.
And then for court records there is an organization, January Advisors, that is already calling all court records in Texas. And so we were able to partner with them as opposed to doing individual case lookups, which would be very challenging because these types of cases straddle jurisdiction.
So they start in a lower court which are regional in the jurisdiction. So we could also have people in multiple different regional courts and then can move through the appellate process to the regular trial court level, which would mean we would have to look in both. And those are different records maintained in different ways. We'd have to look in both places. January Advisors was already doing that work, so we were able to work with them. And they were also collecting address history data which helped us to understand frequency of moves for folks, which helped us to get a picture of housing security, which was pretty great.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: And so of course we'd love to have findings and recommendations, but this was a pilot. And so with 100 participants, 50 in each group, with a survey operation that wasn't quite up to snuff in terms of the non response rate. So we just mostly would go with administrative records.
What did we generally see? I mean again, these would not be results that we could use in terms of inference, but generally we found what did we generally see.
[00:35:45] Speaker C: So through the surveys, the surveys asked questions about housing security.
And then we had all of these other data sources that I just described. We saw a population of folks that seem to be highly equal.
So we saw folks that had really high rates of housing insecurity. They reported self reported high rates of housing insecurity. We also saw high rates of formal eviction. We saw a history of frequent moves which could be considered informal evictions as we described it earlier, or just could be an emblematic of housing insecurity.
We saw mostly renters that reported persistent housing conditions issues, so things like mold and rodents and toilets not working. And often reported more than one of those issues each time they were surveyed and indicated some levels of crowding or overcrowding, meaning there were more people to rooms than is a comfortable setting.
We saw high expense to income ratios, so folks reporting their expenses and their incomes often being either exactly the same or expenses being slightly higher than income, which means that any added expense would completely devastate their ability. It would cause them to have to make choices about what to pay and what not to pay.
And often that is that causes housing insecurity when you need to make choices about living needs.
And these were also folks who seem to not, not who are not reporting essentially that they were seeking legal services or housing resources, at least prior to receiving this information. So they either didn't know about this information or they weren't seeking it. And that could be many reasons. We could hypothesize why that could be. But we asked questions about those, about whether or not what types of legal services, if they were seeking legal services at all.
And they seem to not be seeking that.
And then there's also just this is all under the umbrella of the housing law. In this jurisdiction being aggressive and potentially favoring informal evictions. Encouraging informal evictions. Right.
So this is what we saw in the data from the small sample size that we had. And this is kind of generalizing who was in our study population. But it did seem like we were able to ident by a high risk population in need of the community based services and legal services because they were really at risk for housing insecurity or were actively housing insecurity.
[00:38:40] Speaker B: And of course then without a full study, we can't tell whether the treatment has any effect, whether the intervention here, which is the text messages, they actually benefited.
So we couldn't quite tell, for example, whether there was a difference in take up of legal services. We couldn't tell whether there was a, whether there was a difference in lowering of court case rates. And then we couldn't tell the ultimate question, which was housing security, because we would probably both need to enroll many more people and we would need to extend the follow up periods for longer. Right. So the surveys were only for 12 weeks after enrollment and then the administrative record period was nine months after that. Is that all correct?
[00:39:33] Speaker C: Yeah. And we looked at admin, we obtained consent from each study participant and looked at administrative records for two years prior to their enrollment, which is what gave us us some of this information that you mentioned, the information about formal eviction filings. We had a history for folks prior to their enrollment which can, you know, help us to analyze change. We didn't have a long enough period to do that or enough people to do that. But we do have suspicions about the makeup of this population, not just from the period that we were actively studying them in prospectively, but also a retrospective history.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Terrific. So one message from the podcast is that if you're a funder and you're looking, or if you know anyone that could potentially fund a full scale study.
This is a relatively low cost intervention that might be easy to generalize and to and to scale because it just basically consists of text messages, which is everybody's favorite low cost intervention these days. It's what everybody loves to talk about about when you try to talk about reducing failure to appear rates in the criminal justice context. Everyone wants to talk about text messages, et cetera.
It's something that is used less in civil legal services, in part because without having somebody in jail, you don't have a way to do an interview with them in a civil legal context. So if someone's sued, for example, in debt collection, you don't have them in official custody and say by the way do you want to tell me your cell phone number so that we can give you an idea of what your court dates are coming up? We can text you here.
We had to have the pre existing relationship with a trusted service with service provider and then we could do it.
But there are such things.
There are places networks of text messages of trusted or trusted trusted sources of information that we might be able to use and generalize the study. And the intervention is quite cheap.
So we just need to figure out whether we can get some funding to do a larger scale study and see if the intervention, in addition to being cheap, is also actually effective.
[00:41:53] Speaker C: Right.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: And we don't know that yet.
[00:41:55] Speaker C: Right.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: So what final thoughts on this study, Renee? What what, what do you think are the, are the, is a, is a takeaway from it or a couple of takeaways from it?
[00:42:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I mean I really would love to do the full evaluation. So, so I'll just echo what you just said. We're very committed to doing the full evaluation as is Connective and our partners at the University of Houston who actually that's how this study came to us was their thoughts on legal literacy as a resource as an intervention upstream.
But I also hope that this even the pilot kind of highlights the, the speed with which housing legal matters take place and just gives folks opportunity to contemplate that and maybe there's some opportunity for change to just be kinder to people. We are not the only scholars that are talking about this and looking at this and there are people who are much more in the weeds on this issue and better to talk about. But it is is very apparent and I just hope that in addition to thinking of ways to identify proactively people who are housing insecure and provide those resources, that we also think about potential opportunities to make change to that that process in a way that just gives a little more time to actually use the resources.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: And of course an economist might respond, well, we don't know what effect that would have on the housing market generally. Right. If we're going to have market for housing, we don't know whether whether increasing time periods like that would, would cause, you know, a further worsening of the, of the United States's housing market, which is generally considered to be a supply problem, that the issue is that we have insufficient housing supply and insufficient housing stock in the United States. So we'll, we'll just have to acknowledge that there are potentially, that they're potentially countervailing forces that need to be taken into account.
That said, it does seem awful fast to say that. You know, in some states, for example, there's a five day period in between your trial and your hearing and then if you lose at the, excuse me, five day period in between your filing and your. And your trial slash hearing. And then if you lose and you have, you know, five or six more days to move out, that does seem pretty fast. And it may be that we need. We'd want evidence on the as opposed to conjecture picture on the effects of the. The secondary effects of an extended period of time like that on the housing availability market, whether it actually would affect the availability of housing stock to give people a bit more time.
[00:44:45] Speaker C: Yeah. And I'm all for more affordable housing also, if that's helpful.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Renee, thanks so much.
And as always, and this is as, as anyone that knows the Renee, Renee knows Renee, you have a lot of things going on at once. So this is right. By my count, this is the third Proof Over Precedent interview that you've done on your studies. And we haven't really even scratched the surface with the number of studies that you, that you've constructed on your own and are generally overseeing and involved in. So we'll look forward to talking with you again.
[00:45:21] Speaker C: I hope Eddie Vedder hears this one.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: Terrific. Okay, thanks so much.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: Proof Over Precedent is a production of the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School.
Views expressed in student podcasts are not necessarily those of the A J Lab.
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[00:45:51] Speaker D: The U.S. constitution guarantees legal counsel for people in serious criminal cases.
And historically, well, we know those cases involve men most of the time.
But when it comes to most of the civil cases like custody disputes, evictions or restraining orders, in domestic violence violence cases, there is no constitutional right to state provided legal counsel, even though these are often the cases that affect women the most. And these aren't just paperwork cases. They are about keeping a home, staying with your kids or making sure you are safe.
So we are talking about life changing cases.
